NOTE: DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE COMPRESSED MP4 THAT ARCHIVE.ORG AUTO-GENERATES. 

This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people.  This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online. These rips are, if I am being charitable, dire looking. 

The sourced tape is an official HBO production dub, although not the master which I assume HBO still has. Ricky Jay’s personal effects were acquired by the Lily Library in Indiana University in 2023, including many photographs from this special, so it is plausible that they, too, have a high quality master tape. This tape was initially spotted in a lot of other tapes by an online archivist named John Hand of Pulsing Cinema, who himself captured the tape and offered me the chance to do a full RF rip of it with my Domesday Duplicator. 

Methodology:

Audio is HiFi captured baseband via a RME Babyface Pro FS. Capture was done using a Domesday Duplicator on a RF-tapped Sony SLV-N70. Sync was established using conventional capture. Due to some minor damage to two seconds of the tape in the archiving process, the audio is stitched together using multiple audio captures. In addition, I have attempted to do some very light cleaning up of pops, cracks and humming in Izotope RX, although only enough to clean it up just a little bit. I can provide all relevant audio files if anyone else wishes to do a better job than me. I have also scanned the tape and case in case anyone wants it.

Encoding was done entirely in Vapoursynth, and I have erred on the side of a more transparent encode for this. Deinterlacing was done in QTGMC.

If anyone needs an archival rip of an untransferred tape or Laserdisc, I would be happy to be that beast of burden for the community.

import vapoursynth as vs

from vsdenoise import temporal_degrain

import havsfunc as haf

import awsmfunc as awf

MOTION_DENOISE_OVERLAP = 2

MOTION_DENOISE_BLKSIZE = 4

MOTION_DENOISE_THSAD = 100

core = vs.core

##### Import The Video

src = core.lsmas.LWLibavSource(u'PATH/ricky_jay_2024-11-26.mkv')

##### Crop It

cropped = core.std.Crop(src,8,10,4,10) # left, right, top, bottom

cropped.set_output(0)

##### Change Color Space for VIVTC limitations

deduped = haf.QTGMC(cropped,TFF=True,Sharpness=0.3,TR2=2,Preset="Placebo",MatchPreset='Placebo', MatchPreset2='Placebo', NoisePreset='Slower', Search=3,SourceMatch=3, InputType=0, Lossless=2)

deduped.set_output(1)

##### Change Color Space for Retail Output

output_depth = deduped.fmtc.bitdepth(bits=8)

legalized = output_depth.std.Limiter(

min=(16, 16, 16),

max=(235, 240, 240),

)

legalized.set_output(4)

#To get SAR pipe

#vspipe Ricky_jay_final.vpy -c y4m -o 4 - | ffmpeg -c:v libx264 -crf 16 -preset veryslow -aspect 4:3 sartest.mkv -i -

#and get the SAR, then apply that to the x264 encoding

#Current script --sar 316/371

#frame-start 168

#vspipe Ricky_jay.vpy -c y4m -s 168 -o 4 - | c:\tools\x264\x264-r3107-a8b68eb.exe - --demuxer y4m --crf 16 --sar 316/371 --preset placebo --profile high --threads auto --level 4.1 --rc-lookahead 250 --me umh --no-dct-decimate --no-fast-pskip --deblock -3:-3 --qcomp 0.6 --ipratio 1.30 --aq-mode 3 --aq-strength 0.8 --merange 32 --psy-rd 1:0 --bframes 16 --output Ricky_Jay.mkv

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